A Confederate Dissident, in a Film With Footnotes

The forthcoming Matthew McConaughey drama “Free State of Jones” lays claim to being the first Hollywood film in decades to depict Reconstruction, the still controversial post-Civil War period that attempted to rebuild the South along racially egalitarian lines.

But the movie, written and directed by Gary Ross, might also lay claim to a more unusual title: the first Hollywood drama to come with footnotes.

The film recounts the true story of Newton Knight (Mr. McConaughey), a Confederate deserter who led a ragtag dissident army from the swamps of Jones County, Miss., and continued to fight for the rights of African-Americans after the Civil War ended.

In advance of the film’s release, on June 24, Mr. Ross, whose credits include “Seabiscuit” and the first installment of “The Hunger Games,” is posting an elaborate website annotating some three dozen topics and scenes from the movie, allowing audiences to click through and evaluate for themselves his historical sources, including many primary documents.

“I stopped my life to read and study for two years before I even started writing a script,” Mr. Ross said during a recent interview in his office in Manhattan. “If people want to pick apart this history, they can. But they should know that this wasn’t the glib work of a screenwriter who was inventing things.”

“Free State of Jones” arrives nearly a year after the massacre in a church in Charleston, S.C., renewed debate about the Confederate flag that Knight battled against. But it also lands in the wake of bruising, racially charged debates about whether movies like “Lincoln” and “Selma” give whites too much, or too little, credit for black progress.

While Knight is a hero, Mr. Ross said emphatically, he is not a white savior of African-Americans, but a white ally.

“I think we need to celebrate alliances,” he said. “And it is demonstrably true that Newt was allied with African-Americans all through Reconstruction after a lot of white people in the South had bailed.”

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The actual Newt Knight, who is played by Matthew McConaughey in “Free State of Jones.”

In carrying the Newton Knight story through the violent rollback of the promise of Reconstruction, Mr. Ross is taking on the negative image of the period driven deep into American consciousness by films like “Gone With the Wind” and D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” as well as the Lost Cause nostalgia that has infused many movies since.

“This is not your granddaddy’s Civil War movie,” said the Yale historian David Blight, one of 11 historical consultants listed prominently in the closing credits. “It doesn’t in any way sentimentalize any element of the Confederate cause. Quite the contrary.”

Mr. Ross first encountered the Knight story when a colleague showed him a film treatment around 2006, when he was coming off “Seabiscuit.”

“I had no idea there was dissent within the Confederacy,” he said. “That immediately fascinated me.”

He read and eventually optioned Victoria E. Bynum’s “The Free State of Jones” (2001), the first modern scholarly book to piece together the scattered evidence of Knight’s story. To get the bigger picture, he also approached leading scholars of Reconstruction, starting with the Columbia professor Eric Foner.

“I’m normally skeptical about Hollywood history, so I sent him off with a reading list,” Mr. Foner, who has not yet seen the movie, said by email. “He diligently read the books and came back, so I was happy to consult with him.”

Eventually Mr. Ross met John Stauffer, a Harvard professor who has written extensively about abolitionism. He set the director up with visiting-scholar credentials and created what Mr. Stauffer described as a rigorous syllabus. “It was like working with grad students you really like,” he said.

The website Mr. Ross has created from his research covers topics ranging from material details like the horrifying spiked collar worn by a runaway slave to broader issues like the racial makeup of Knight’s military company and whether Knight ever formally declared an independent State of Jones that seceded from the Confederacy.

Where Mr. Ross has invented characters or episodes or made guesses about motivations, he explains why, pointing to justifications in the historical record. For example, the film depicts Knight’s decades-long relationship with Rachel (played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw of “Belle”), a former slave who once belonged to his grandfather and with whom he had several children. The site shows an 1876 document in which Knight (who remained married to his white wife) deeded her 160 acres of land — an indication, Mr. Ross writes, that theirs was “a loving relationship that grew over time,” rather than manifesting a “Thomas Jefferson/Sally Hemings power dynamic.” Knight did not own slaves.

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Matthew McConaughey in Gary Ross’s “Free State of Jones.”CreditMurray Close

The extent of Knight’s collaborations across the color line has been a point of sometimes hot debate among scholars, including those on Mr. Ross’s team. In 2009, after Mr. Stauffer and Sally Jenkins published “The State of Jones,” a book inspired by Mr. Ross’s screenplay, Ms. Bynum posted a blistering three-part review on her blog, questioning what she called its “highly exaggerated claims” that Knight had fought for racial equality before and after the war.

Ms. Bynum, who also consulted on the film, said in an interview that she didn’t want to revisit the controversy, but noted that since her review, new documents had surfaced that lent support to the film’s interpretations.

“I would not characterize Newt as a civil rights activist, but the factual ground is solid, and there is room to interpret beyond that,” she said.

Mr. Ross said he carefully considered how to depict Knight’s relationships with African-Americans. In a scene showing the meeting of the Union League (which in the South functioned as a black secret society promoting the Republican Party and voting rights of freedmen), Mr. Ross noted that Moses Washington, a fictional African-American character, leads the meeting while Knight sits to the side.

The Union League, he writes on the site, was “an incubator of black political agency.”

Another fictionalized scene — in which Knight leads a group of African Americans into town to attempt to vote in the fraud-ridden state election of 1875 — may smack to some of white saviorism. But it can be justified, Mr. Ross said, by a document showing that in 1875 Knight was made a colonel in a unit set up by Mississipi’s radical Republican governor Adlebert Ames to protect the voting rights of African-Americans — “incontrovertible proof,” he said, of Knight’s “commitment to racial justice.”

It remains to be seen how Mr. Ross’s film will land with audiences. Kellie Carter Jackson, an assistant professor of history at Hunter College and the author of the coming book “Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence,” said there was a need for a more accurate depiction of Reconstruction, but noted that Hollywood “has a hard time divesting white men from the center of the universe.”

“If it’s really about Knight being an ally, then shouldn’t McConaughey be the supporting actor and not the lead?” she said.

Mr. Ross said that Knight’s story was just one story and that he welcomed more films like Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation,” about Nat Turner’s rebellion, which will be released this fall.

“I wish someone would also make a film about Denmark Vesey, a film about Tunis Campbell, a film about Robert Smalls, a film about Albion Tourgée,” he said, rattling off the names of undersung 19th-century African-American heroes and white allies. “There are a lot of stories that need to turn the lights on so we can have an objective view of history.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Confederate Dissident, Footnoted and on Film. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe